My Royal Mail misadventure

When you send an item through the post using Royal Mail's recorded delivery service you expect it to arrive at its intended destination, guaranteed.

The Post Office refused Phillip Saich compensation after losing his World of Adventures ticket.

But there are NO guarantees with recorded delivery and the confusion around this service has led Postwatch to call for an overhaul of how it is sold.

The regulator says dissatisfaction over recorded delivery accounts for 15% of all complaints, up from 10% in 2004.

According to lobby group Which?, 120,000 people complain about this service each year.

Some critics suggest the service should be dumped altogether. Recorded delivery costs 72p on top of the postage of an item. The sender gets a receipt, while the postman is supposed to collect a signature from someone at the designated address (it does not have to be the person the item is addressed to).

What the sender does not get, contrary to widely held belief, is a cast-iron promise of compensation if the item is lost.

Phillip Saich ordered two tickets worth £40 for himself and a friend for Chessington World of Adventures in Surrey last June. The company selling the tickets offered to send them first class, recorded, or special delivery.

Unfortunately, Phillip, 26, of Braintree, Essex, chose recorded and was out when the postwoman tried to deliver the tickets. She left a card asking him to go to the sorting office to sign in person. He went there the following morning, but the tickets were missing.

'I'd have been better off if they had been posted second class,' Phillip says. 'I just don't see the point of recorded delivery.' The biggest shock for Phillip, who works for an export broker, was that no compensation would be paid. Though redress is given for some items sent recorded, tickets are excluded.

Postwatch says Phillip's experience is all too common. 'It's not a good system and it's not a great service,' a spokesman says.

'There are few occasions where recorded delivery should be sold.' There appear many instances where postmen do not collect signatures at all, or collect them from people other than the addressee, even if the recorded delivery item does get to its intended recipient.

Postwatch says the only clear benefit of the service is that it provides senders with proof of posting, though a free certificate of posting is available with first class post anyway.

Special delivery - either by 9am the next day or at any time the next day (see above) - is much dearer than recorded.

However, the service carries a guarantee and a variable element of insurance, provided senders have some clear proof of their purchase or ownership of the valuable item sent.

Postwatch says in most cases it is what people really need. Royal Mail says: 'Recorded delivery is a value-for-money service used to send annually many tens of millions of letters that require a signature on delivery.

Save our post offices

Financial Mail and This is Money have been fighting post office closures since 2002. See more here...

'We continue to work hard to improve the service and to ensure that customers are aware about which service is the most appropriate one to use.' Yet a Mori survey in July found almost one in two people thought the postal service had deteriorated in the past two years.

There are no authoritative figures on how much mail is lost or stolen, though conservative estimates suggest it is 15m items a year. By Royal Mail's own admission, a growing portion of first class post - 15 items out of 100 - fails to be delivered next day.

And it is not only individuals who are losing faith. Banks, lawyers, accountants and other firms that routinely post valuable items are switching to more reliable methods, such as encrypted files transmitted electronically.